nterrogatively, turning round.

My mother thought herself the person addressed, and nodded her gracious
assent to the authority of Diodorus. His opinion thus fortified, my
father continued,--"If, I say, we accept the authority of Diodorus, the
inscription on the Egyptian library was: 'The Medicine of the Mind.'
Now, that phrase has become notoriously trite and hackneyed, and people
repeat vaguely that books are the medicine of the mind. Yes; but to
apply the medicine is the thing!"

"So you have told us at least twice before, brother," quoth the Captain,
bluffly. "And what Diodorus has to do with it, I know no more than the
man of the moon."

"I shall never get on at this rate," said my father, in a tone between
reproach and entreaty.

"Be good children, Roland and Blanche both," said my mother, stopping
from her work and holding up her needle threateningly,--and indeed
inflicting a slight puncture upon the Captain's shoulder.

"'Rem acu tetigisti,' my dear," said my father, borrowing Cicero's pun
on the occasion. (1) "And now we shall go upon velvet. I say, then,
that books, taken indiscriminately, are no cure to the diseases and
afflictions of the mind. There is a world of science necessary in the
taking them. I have known some people in great sorrow fly to a novel,
or the last light book in fashion. One might as well take a rose-draught
for the plague! Light reading does not do when the heart is really
heavy. I am told that Goethe, when he lost his son, took to study a
science that was new to him. Ah! Goethe was a physician who knew what he
was about. In a great grief like that you cannot tickle and divert the
mind, you must wrench it away, abstract, absorb,--bury it in an abyss,
hurry it into a labyrinth. Therefore, for the irremediable sorrows of
middle life and old age I recommend a strict chronic course of science
and hard reasoning,--counter-irritation. Bring the brain to act upon the
heart! If science is too much against the grain (for we have not all
got mathematical heads), something in the reach of the humblest
understanding, but sufficiently searching to the highest,--a new
language, Greek, Arabic, Scandinavian, Chinese, or Welsh! For the
loss of fortune, the dose should be applied less directly to the
understanding,--I would administer something elegant and cordial. For as
the heart is crushed and lacerated by a loss in the affections, so it
is rather the head that aches and suffers by the loss of mon